


North Star

by gakorogirl



Category: Edgar Allan Poe's Murder Mystery Dinner Party (Web Series)
Genre: Christmas, Christmas Party, F/M, Gen, Poe Party Secret Santa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-22
Updated: 2017-12-22
Packaged: 2019-02-18 12:25:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13100067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gakorogirl/pseuds/gakorogirl
Summary: Lenore and Annabel Lee try to get Poe out of his slump by re-inviting the ghostly authors to a Christmas party at his house. It goes slightly better than could be expected.





	North Star

**Author's Note:**

> For misnamedhellion on tumblr.

“You invited  _ who?”  _ Edgar asks, blinking sleepily. Annabel Lee is standing over the high-backed armchair where he collapsed last night while trying to write a sufficiently ominous sea shanty for his newest story, and he’s still trying to muddle through whatever she just said.

“Well, it was Lenore who insisted. I was nervous about having another big party, you know, but she said that they’re probably bored, what with being ghosts and all. And then it seemed rude not to invite Oscar and Hemingway, so I added them to the list. Your delivery ravens are really friendly,” she adds.

“Really? They bite me- wait, you  _ invited everyone back here for Christmas?” _

“ _ I  _ invited them back,” Lenore says, appearing next to him and draping herself over the back of the chair. She waves a hand at the fire, and the dying coals splutter a few times in an attempt to come back to life. “Geez, Ed, you’re going to catch hypothermia if you keep living like this.”

Edgar grimaces. “I find you considerably more vexing than the lovely Annabel Lee,” he says as he stands up and buttons his shirtsleeves. “And I’m getting- ah- vexed.”

“Well,” says Lenore, “I don’t even think Hemingway is  _ coming.  _ His raven came back half an hour ago with no message attatched. And I didn’t invite Barrie or Verne or Twain or Emerson.”

“ _ I  _ didn’t invite Emerson, he tried to invite himself!”

“Whatever. You can’t keep sulking around here in your creepy old house drinking wine and not opening the blinds. You need, you know... _ friends? _ ”

Never once, in the years Lenore has been haunting him, has Edgar managed to win an argument against her. And the beautiful Annabel Lee is beaming and holding several miles of silver and gold tinsel, and Edgar sags back into the chair and rubs his eyes. He  _ has  _ gone through a lot of bottles of wine in the past few months.

“All right, all right,” he sighs. Three days to prepare. And hopefully this won’t turn into a repeat of the worst night of- well. This year. The worst night of this year, at least. “Do we have any Christmas lights?”

* * *

 

Hemingway does not know why he’s here. He is in Edgar Allan Poe’s creepy house in the woods. At a Christmas party. At a Christmas party where almost all the guests are ghosts who were murdered here, last time Poe tried to do something  _ fun.  _

He’s here because he was un-invited to two other Christmas parties. Because even he has to admit that Poe has a well-stocked liquor cabinet. Because, well, Lenore showed up and told him that she would haunt his ass until his liver failed, because Annabel Lee was  _ very  _ disappointed that he was the only person who hadn’t RSVPed. 

With a sigh, Hemingway raps on the door. There are impressively long icicles cascading off the gutters, lit up by the yellow and white string lights. Annabel Lee answers, and her face lights up- literally. She casts a faint glow on the ice-crusted snowdrifts outside. 

Right. Ghost. Which incidentally means she’s off the relationship market, because only Poe is weird enough to actually date a ghost. “Merry Christmas,” Hemingway says as he steps inside and shakes snow off his coat.

“Got that boar knife of yours?” Lenore asks, suddenly appearing next to him. He gives a badly muffled shout and then regains his composure, leaning back against the wall. 

“Of  _ course  _ I brought my knife,” he says gruffly. “In case Poe’s got some kind of hell...boar locked in his creepy basement. Or in case of any more  _ murderers. _ ”

“Oh, good  _ evening  _ Ernest,” beams Oscar Wilde, walking rapidly up and inserting himself between them before Lenore can answer. “You know, you’re just in time to help make the eggnog. I’m helping Edgar redecorate, make this place a little less dismal.” He has a length of glittery green tinsel draped around his shoulders, and Hemingway is pretty sure he’s wearing some kind of gold eyeshadow.

“No, you’re  _ not,”  _ Poe shouts from the kitchen, and briefly appears in the foyer. He is holding an egg in one hand and a bottle of rum in the other. There is a faint smell of cinnamon in the air. “Oscar, if you move  _ one more thing-” _

“One of the ravens just talked to me,” says Eliot, sprinting up the stairs from the cellar. She’s dropped the hoarse voice and fake mustache, although her hair is still awkwardly shoved up under her hat. Hemingway notices there are still bloodstains on her forehead and the roots of her hair.

“Yes, they do that,” Poe tells her, unconcerned. Hemingway attempts to sidle up and take the bottle of rum from his hand, while Wilde busies himself re-wrapping the red and green garlands on the staircase. There is a very large and festive red bow tied to the end of his cane. “Corvids have a tongue and beak shape that enables them to mimic most of the sounds in human speech, like parrots. Ravens are just the only ones smart enough to properly form words. I like them.”

“They’re kinda creepy,” says Lenore. “Has anyone seen H.G.?”

“I’m here,” H.G. says suddenly. Hemingway thinks the number of people in the foyer is bordering on ridiculous. “I h-had to ask Verne about something.”

“Time for hot chocolate!” calls Annabel Lee, sweeping in with a rustle of her dress. She is holding a tray in both hands, laden with festive Christmas mugs, candy canes, and a small mountain of marshmallows. 

Hemingway frowns. “Thought we were having eggnog,” he says.

“Well, if you’d hand back the rum so I can  _ finish,  _ we could,” Poe snaps, grabbing back the bottle and weaving between the guests into the kitchen. Someone knocks on the door. Hemingway reaches over and opens it to reveal Louisa May Alcott, mercifully no longer coughing but still beaming with that very awkward wide smile.

“Merry Christmas,” she says happily.

 

* * *

  
  


“You don’t take  _ marshmallows  _ in your hot chocolate?” squeaks Annabel Lee, her eyebrows rising. Louisa May continues sipping at her tragically marshmallow-less mug.

“I don’t care for them,” she says.

“Are you allergic to joy?” demands Lenore, draping herself across the back of a couch and pouring more marshmallows into her own steaming mug. H.G. is perched on the edge of the couch with his feet tucked up beneath him.

“Wow,” Hemingway mutters under his breath, and reaches across Fyodor to grab the vodka. “You know, Mary hasn’t taken any either,” he says out loud, but he does drop a few marshmallows in as he spikes his drink.

“Too reminiscent of eyeballs,” Mary Shelley pronounces, but she snatches a marshmallow off the pyramid forming in Oscar’s mug and squeezes it between her fingers a few times before popping it into her mouth. Behind her, Lenore raises her eyebrows and H.G. looks down with some alarm at his own hot chocolate.

Edgar drops a couple of cinnamon sticks into a pan and starts them simmering, which is most certainly not a habit he picked up to hide the ocasional stench of death that permeates the house. At any rate, it rapidly fills the surrounding rooms with a festive cinnamon smell as he pours the eggnog into chilled glasses.

“To all our friends present!” Lenore shouts as he walks in, waving her hand to levitate a glass towards her. 

Fyodor throws a log into the fire, sending a shower of sparks into the air, and adds, “And to our enemies, who are mercifully  _ not.”  _ This is met with soft laughter and raised glasses, and Fyodor grins good-naturedly as he grabs a glass and drains it.

Two hours later, Edgar has nearly come to blows with Hemingway over a spilled glass, and Fyodor is swigging vodka out of the bottle and shouting. Lenore rubs her eyes, although the gesture doesn’t mean much to a ghost.

“Hey, Mary Anne,” she calls. “Pass that plate of cheese and crackers, would you?”

“ _ No!”  _ Fyodor yells, jabbing a finger at Louisa May. Shelley is watching the argument with some interest as she spreads soft cheese onto a cracker. “In Russia we  _ know  _ there are not many cars, there is no need to say “the” car. You say,  _ get in car,  _ everyone knows what car you speak of!”

“I think I’m actually getting educational v-value out of this,” H.G. says quietly, fiddling with his handheld radio, and Lenore snickers. A tinny Christmas carol begins to come out of the radio, and Fyodor stops speaking midsentence and turns to look curiously at them. In the hall, Poe and Hemingway pause in their argument. H.G. holds up the radio and spins a few dials, cutting out the worst of the static.

“Time dilation radio,” he says quietly. “Picking up signal from the later part of the twentieth century, if I’m not mistaken.” 

_ It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas,  _ the radio whirs, interspersed with brief staticky patches. H.G. flicks it with one finger and the signal clears a little more.

“The stars are gorgeous tonight,” announces Annabel Lee, in the quiet. She has her mittens on, and there are snowflakes in her hair. (Lenore is impressed that she’s managed to make herself material enough to catch snowflakes.) 

“Well,” Edgar says, picking up the shards of the glass he dropped when Hemingway-  _ allegedly  _ accidentally- bumped into him- “Let’s all go out and enjoy the night for a few minutes, shall we?”

The stars  _ are  _ beautiful, covering the whole sky in silver light. The moon hangs as a thin crescent near the tops of the skeleton-trees on Edgar’s property. A few escaped ravens perch in the branches, watching silently. H.G.’s radio plays  _ Hark the Herald Angels Sing,  _ and Eliot sings along under her breath.

“Look at these icicles,” Shelley says in a hushed voice. The single streak of mad-scientist white in her hair almost glows in the moonlight as she runs her gloved fingers along a four-foot icicle hanging from the roof.

One of the ravens cries out, once. It sounds an awful lot like  _ Noel. _

“See the Big Dipper?” says H.G. to Lenore, speaking slowly and softly as though his voice might scare away the sudden fragile peace. “The two outermost stars make a line up to Polaris.”

“I thought the North Star was supposed to be the brightest one,” Lenore says, only slightly more loudly as she squints to follow H.G.’s pointing hand. 

“It’s important for finding your way,” said Hemingway, blowing on his hands to warm them. “Doesn’t have to be flashy. Just as long as it’s always there.”

“Polaris is the closest visible star to celestial north, which makes it the axis that the rest of the stars circle around,” H.G. continues. His goggles fall down over his face and he absentmindedly pushes them up before letting them slip back down. “Although technically in classical antiquity, the star closest to true north was Kochab. Starting in the ninety-eighth century, the north star is Deneb, although it-”

Lenore kisses him.

Edgar is not looking at the stars, because he is looking at the beautiful Annabel Lee and the way that she is not quite solid in the silver snow-light. There is stardust in her hair, and the almost-hollow spaces in her eyes are filled up with silver. Annabel Lee is looking at the sky, and the bare branches of the black trees around Edgar’s house make shadows on her face. Her mouth is a little bit open.

_ “While the stars that oversprinkle _

_ All the heavens seem to twinkle _

_ With a crystalline delight;”  _

He intones, and then looks sideways at Annabel Lee. She finally glances over and smiles at him, and he takes her elbow and gives her an awkward smile. “Merry Christmas,” he says, and she leans her head against his shoulder.

“Merry Christmas, Edgar.”

_ For peace on earth, good will to man,  _ sings the staticky radio. The ravens stir, black-feathered and rustling, and the North Star shines soft as a lullaby overhead. 

“You know, mistletoe is extremely poisonous,” says Shelley.

“Just like  _ you  _ to ruin the mood,” Hemingway snaps, flicking the snow off his jacket.

**Author's Note:**

> Some of Fyodor's dialogue was inspired by this tumblr post: http://languages-georg.tumblr.com/post/162442146095/so-i-used-to-have-a-russian-friend-who-had-a


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